Blinken calls for push to get Gaza truce deal over 'finish line'

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on Monday for a final push for a Gaza ceasefire before President Joe Biden leaves office, after a Hamas official told Reuters that the movement had cleared a list of 34 hostages as first to go free under a truce.

“We very much want to bring this over the finish line in the next two weeks, the time we have remaining,” Blinken told a press conference in South Korea, when asked whether a ceasefire deal was close.

Israel has sent a team of mid-ranking officials to Qatar for talks brokered by Qatari and Egyptian mediators. Some Arabic media reports said that David Barnea, the Mossad head who has been leading negotiations, was expected to join them. The Israeli prime minister’s office did not comment.

It remains unclear how close the two sides remain, with some signs of movement but little indication of a shift in some of the key demands that have so far blocked any truce for more than a year.

US President-elect Donald Trump has said that there would be “hell to pay” in the Middle East if hostages held by Hamas were not freed before his inauguration on 20 January, now viewed in the region as an unofficial deadline for a truce deal.

According to Gaza health officials, nearly 46,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians in the enclave. The offensive was launched after Hamas fighters carried out a cross-border incursion in October 2023 during which 1,200 people were killed, many of them by the Israel Defence Forces. Around 250 hostages were taken back into Gaza.

More than 100 hostages are still believed to be held in Gaza, and Hamas says that it will not free them without an agreement that ends the war with Israeli withdrawal. Israel says it will not halt its offensive until Hamas is dismantled as a military and governing power and all hostages go free.

READ: Israel destroying security and rule of law in Gaza

A Hamas official told Reuters that the movement had cleared a list submitted by Israel of 34 hostages who could be freed in the initial phase of a truce. The list provided by the official included female soldiers, plus elderly, female and minor-age civilians.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that the list had been given by Israel to Qatari mediators as far back as July, and Israel had so far received no confirmation or comment from Hamas about whether the hostages on it were alive. “Israel will continue to act relentlessly for the return of all our hostages,” it said.

Israeli occupation forces have intensified their operations in recent weeks. They have continued air strikes across the enclave, killing at least 48 people and wounding 75 over the past 24 hours, according to the Gaza health ministry.

Harsh winter weather, meanwhile, continues to exact a toll on the hundreds of thousands displaced into makeshift shelters, with officials saying that a 35-day-old baby had died of exposure, at least the eighth victim of the cold in the past two weeks.

Officials from Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat in the central Gaza Strip said that an Israeli air strike at a school compound sheltering displaced families had wounded at least 40 people.

While Israel’s military says Hamas has largely been destroyed as an organised military force, its fighters continue to hold out in the rubble of Gaza, which has been largely reduced to wasteland by the months of bombardment. On Monday, three rockets were fired from the besieged territory, one of which hit a building in the nearby Israeli city of Sderot without causing any casualties, Israeli police said. Sderot is built on the ruins and land of the Palestinian village of Najd, which was ethnically-cleansed by Jewish terrorists on 13 May, 1948.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, another Palestinian territory where Israeli army and settler violence has surged since the start of the Gaza war, gunmen killed three Israelis and wounded several others when they opened fire on a car and bus near the Israeli settlement of Kedumim. All of Israel’s settlements and the settlers who live in them are illegal under international law.